Tag: arrah

How popular is the baby name Arrah in the United States right now? How popular was it historically? Find out using the graph below! Plus, see baby names similar to Arrah and check out all the blog posts that mention the name Arrah.

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Popularity of the Baby Name Arrah

Number of Babies Named Arrah

Born in the U.S. Since 1880

Posts that Mention the Name Arrah

I believed for a long time that Dardanella was the first of these introduced-by-song names. It bounded onto the charts in 1920 — before the widespread usage of radio and record players, impressively. This must make it one-of-a-kind, right?

Nope. I’ve since gone back over the early name lists and discovered a musical name that debuted on the charts a whopping 17 years earlier, in 1903. That name is Anona:

1908: 8 baby girls named Anona

1907: 6 baby girls named Anona

1906: 12 baby girls named Anona

1905: 22 baby girls named Anona

1904: 22 baby girls named Anona

1903: 7 baby girls named Anona [debut]

1902: unlisted

The SSA’s early name lists are relatively unreliable, so here are the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) numbers for the same time-span:

1908: 24 baby girls named Anona (SSDI)

1907: 24 baby girls named Anona (SSDI)

1906: 38 baby girls named Anona (SSDI)

1905: 48 baby girls named Anona (SSDI)

1904: 57 baby girls named Anona (SSDI)

1903: 18 baby girls named Anona (SSDI)

1902: 1 baby girl named Anona (SSDI)

The song “Anona” was published in mid-1903. It was written by Vivian Grey, which was a pseudonym for either presidential niece Mabel McKinley or prolific songwriter Robert A. King, sources don’t agree.

The song became very popular and was recorded multiple times. (Here’s Henry Burr’s version, for instance.) This is the chorus:

My sweet Anona, in Arizona,
There is no other maid I’d serenade;
By camp-fires gleaming, of you I’m dreaming,
Anona, my sweet Indian maid.

So-called “Indian love songs” were becoming trendy around this time, thanks to the success of the song “Hiawatha” (1902). Here are a few more that, like “Anona,” have titles that were also used as female names in the songs:

The list was created by amateur genealogist G. M. Atwater as a resource for writers. It contains names and name combinations that were commonly seen in the U.S. from the 1840s to the 1890s. Below is the full list (with a few minor changes).